


5 Times Roy Picked Dare & 1 Time He Picked Truth

by icewhisper



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, M/M, Maes Hughes Lives, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23927122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: The military academy had a silly tradition of playing Truth or Dare. Maes and Roy never shook the habit.
Relationships: Gracia Hughes/Maes Hughes, Gracia Hughes/Maes Hughes/Roy Mustang, Gracia Hughes/Roy Mustang, Maes Hughes/Roy Mustang
Comments: 25
Kudos: 176
Collections: Truth or...?





	5 Times Roy Picked Dare & 1 Time He Picked Truth

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the truth/honesty prompt on the Snipers discord server. Is anyone surprised I made this into an OT3 situation? No? Good.

**_1._ **

“Truth or dare,” Roy repeated dryly, one eyebrow raised as he stared across the circle at Gregory Herman. The boy – two years older and in his final stages of training before they sent him off to war – pointed at him with the bottleneck of his beer.

“A tried and true tradition around here,” he agreed, a little too boisterous, but none of them faulted him for it. Graduation was right around the corner for a handful of the people in their messy circle and they’d already received their orders. Gregory would be going to Ishval and as he stared at him – blond hair, brown eyes, and skin that would burn in the shade – he didn’t have the heart to tell him no.

“Okay,” he said as he leaned back against the couch behind him, shoulder bumping against Jenna Kenney – another almost-graduate, but she was getting stationed at the Drachma border.

“It is tradition,” Maes told him, resigned, from where he sat on the other side of the circle and Roy remembered his entire family was military. He took a drink from his glass with a wary look that made Roy wonder what horror stories his family had told him before he decided he was better off not knowing. “Don’t ask me where it started.”

“We don’t _want_ to know where it started,” a small redhead with glasses said. Roy hadn’t actually caught her name. She glanced around. “The things we say here…”

“Doesn’t leave the circle,” Maes assured her. “You can’t keep a secret, you don’t play.”

They all looked around the circle, cautiously weighing what they knew and what they didn’t of each person. Questioning how far they might be willing to go.

“You say no to a dare or you don’t want to answer a truth,” Maes explained when someone asked him, “the penalty’s streaking across campus.”

“You’d run past at least four guard posts!” someone cried.

“Six,” Roy corrected idly, “and you’d run by the instructor’s quarters.”

The gazes across their lopsided circle grew more cautious and three people bowed out before the remaining group settled into their seats on the floor. More glances. Firm nods.

“Frank!” Gregory called when the silence stretched for a few seconds too long, his voice too loud when Frank was right next to him. “Truth or dare?”

Frank tossed back the rest of his drink, declared _dare_ , and it devolved from there. The booze kept flowing as they played and inhibitions got a little looser. The redhead – by the third round, Roy had given up all hope of learning her name – balked when Frank asked her which of their instructors she was sleeping with and had to go streak across the campus for her refusal to answer.

She didn’t come back, but Maes assured them she wouldn’t get much more than a slap on the wrist for it.

“They _expect_ us to play this,” Maes reminded them. “It’s tradition.”

Another two streakers didn’t return, but one did, met with cheers and whoops of laughter as he came barrelling back into the room, naked, and did a victory lap around the inside of the circle.

Roy reached for the bottle someone handed him and took a swig.

“Mustang, all you. Truth or dare?”

“Dare,” he decided as Alan went to put his clothes back on.

Ingrid stared at him, blue eyes squinting at him as she balanced her chin on her fist. “I dare you to…” She hummed, considering, and looked around the room. “Kiss Hughes!”

Maes choked on his drink. “How’d I get pulled into this?!” he sputtered, but he was laughing. Better than utter disgust, Roy thought. He was going to _kill_ Ingrid. 

“I’m not streaking,” he told Maes firmly as he got up and mostly stumbled over to where his friend sat. He knelt in front of him, considering. It wasn’t as if Maes would be the first guy he’d kissed, but he’d always kept that to private spaces and it was _Maes_. The guy wasn’t unattractive, but he was Roy’s best friend. He wanted to throttle him more than kiss him most days.

“And use tongue!” Ingrid added with a shriek of laughter.

Roy rolled his eyes and leaned in before he could tell Ingrid to go get her rocks off somewhere else. He braced himself with one hand on Maes’ knee and another on his shoulder as he pressed their lips together. Maes stayed stiff for all of a second before he seemed to give into the hilarity of it and kissed back.

Someone catcalled behind them as Roy slipped his tongue into Maes’ mouth and Maes’ hand closed gently around his wrist.

“Alright, soldiers,” Gregory laughed eventually, “either stop or get a room. We’ve got a game to play!”

Roy broke the kiss with a sigh and sat back on his heels as Maes blinked slowly at him. He grinned. “Truth or dare, Hughes?” he asked, cheeky, and returned to his spot in the circle.

Maes picked truth, but when the game was over hours later and they stumbled back to the dorms, he leaned up against Roy, breath hot against his skin, and asked, “Truth or dare, Roy?”

“Oh, shut up.”

They’d barely fallen through the door of Maes’ room when he kissed him again.

**_2._ **

Whatever he and Maes had been doing had always come with an expiration date. No amount of rolls between the sheets or kisses shared in dark corners changed the fact that Maes wanted to settle down with a wife and kids someday. Roy could never give him the things he wanted in the end and he wouldn’t ask Maes to settle for something they’d have to keep secret. Kisses in crowded rooms when everyone was too drunk to care were one thing, but Maes could never kiss him on the street. Could never get down on one knee and ask Roy to stay with him.

“When you meet someone, no hard feelings,” he’d told Maes once when the other man had asked what came next. “You’re going to settle down, Maes. I’m not going to stand in the way of that.”

“You could too,” Maes pointed out softly. “That girl that visited-”

“Riza?” Roy laughed. “No. We’re not like that.” He wasn’t even sure Riza was interested in _anyone_ like that, much less him.

Maes didn’t argue with him, but he met Gracia a week later and whatever they’d had ended.

Roy told himself that he wasn’t sad.

He was pretty sure he was lying to himself.

Gracia was great. Maes was obsessed with her, doting and over-the-top in every way that Roy thought would drive a person crazy, but Gracia just smiled and endured it. She didn’t even act like it was annoying.

He knew Maes had been nervous for them to meet – if he was worried Roy wouldn’t approve or Gracia would figure out they’d been more than friends once, Roy didn’t know – but he genuinely liked her.

“You do?” Maes asked, relieved, when he told him.

“She’s good for you,” he said. “Not many women out there can put up with a grown man hanging all over them like a toddler.”

Maes shoved him. “Wait until you fall in love.”

“You’ve known her for a _month_ ,” Roy reminded him rather than think too much about the part of him that wondered if he already had, because he _hadn’t_. He and Maes had never been like that – could never be like that – and there was no point thinking about something that didn’t exist anymore.

“I know when I love someone,” Maes said, weighted, and Roy’s mouth went dry.

They didn’t say another word.

One week before graduation, they got their orders and Roy stared down at the paper with a dull sense of dread. He’d known this was coming. He’d passed the State Alchemist exam a month before and a week after that, Fuhrer Bradley had announced that all State Alchemists would be deployed to Ishval. 

Maes had cancelled his date with Gracia that night and stayed with Roy as he drank himself numb.

He’d _known_ where his orders would send him, but something about seeing it on paper made the nerves settle heavy in his stomach.

“Ishval?” Maes asked when he found him hunched over on a bench in the quad.

Roy nodded.

“Me too.”

Roy’s head shot up, eyes wide, as Maes sat down next to him and handed over his own paper. They both shipped out a week after graduation and… “You’re in my battalion,” he said softly.

“Good,” Maes murmured and clasped a hand on the back of Roy’s neck. “Come on. We’re going out.”

Out ended up being a bar off campus to meet Gracia, but they only stayed for one drink before the newscasts over the radio chased them out. They made it back to her apartment instead, paper bags full of alcohol, and sat themselves in the living room to drink in the peaceful silence.

Gracia curled into Maes’ side, one hand curled loosely in his shirt as the other held onto the beer bottle. Roy took a heavy swig from his own bottle rather than let himself feel like a third wheel.

“One week?” she asked softly and Maes nodded, jaw tight.

“Yeah. The train leaves at 0900,” he told her.

“I’ll be there to see you off,” she said as her eyes found Roy, “both of you.”

He smiled at her weakly and didn’t think about his aunt or how his sisters had barely stopped crying since the decree. “Thanks.”

She raised her beer to him and he leaned forward to clink his own against it as Maes rested his chin against her hair. “Roy, truth or dare?”

“We’re not on campus,” he reminded him with an eye roll, deliberately casual, because while they’d brought the game up occasionally over the last couple years, it had mostly ended with them in bed together.

“It’s an Academy thing,” Maes explained to her as if Roy hadn’t protested at all. “People usually play after they get their orders. Release some of the tension.” Which wasn’t untrue – it really was part of the whole tradition – but they also typically had more than three people.

“Then, let’s play,” she said easily.

“I’m not streaking across the block if I refuse something,” Roy warned.

Maes laughed. “No streaking penalty,” he promised. “They’d actually arrest you here. Besides, I don’t want Gracia having to streak anywhere.” He cooed the last bit at her as he kissed her cheek. Roy rolled his eyes.

“What about switching?” she suggested, considering. “If you refuse a dare, you have to answer a truth and vice versa.”

He and Maes nodded their agreement and the game began. It was more harmless than the one at the Academy, less about pushing someone to see how embarrassed they were willing to get and more good natured fun.

He chugged a beer.

Maes confessed that, yeah, he took the quiche just to be a dick rather than introduce himself like a normal person.

Gracia, blushing, admitted that she used to skinnydip in the river by her house.

Questions kept flowing as bottles kept emptying and getting traded out for fresh ones. By the time one of Roy’s dares resulted in him using Maes as a canvas so he could show that, yes, his sisters made sure he knew how to do makeup, none of them were really thinking about deployment assignments. Someone dared Gracia to order Xingese from the place down the street on her next turn, because none of them wanted to get up.

When it came, Maes got dared to answer the door in one of Gracia’s skirts, lips still painted red, while they laughed from their spots on the floor. He couldn’t zip it up in the back. Roy was surprised he got it over his thighs at all.

Gracia wiped tears from her eyes as they dug into cartons with chopsticks, chasing noodles and dumplings with beer. 

“Roy,” she said later, pointing at him with the utensils she was still playing with even though they’d finished eating, “truth or dare?”

“Dare,” he said at the same time Maes groaned that he _always_ picked that.

Gracia giggled, contemplating for a second, and glanced at Maes before she looked back at him. “Kiss me.”

Roy choked on his beer and turned panicked, wide eyes to Maes, but his friend smiled and waved him along like a drunken _fool_. “You heard the lady,” Maes said easily. “Unless you want to answer a truth.”

Roy glared at him and forced his gaze back to Gracia. At some point during the night, their game circle had closed in and when Maes had gone off to answer the door, Gracia had leaned up against his shoulder as she laughed herself to tears. She’d never moved back and Maes had settled himself back into their tighter circle. She stared at him now, lips turned up in a smile that – had she been looking at Maes – he would have thought was flirty.

“Five seconds, soldier,” she told him, teasing, and he leaned in before he could talk himself out of it.

He meant for it to be quick, a few seconds of lips pressed against lips before he pulled away and dared Gracia to go kiss her _boyfriend_ instead, but her fingers tangled up in his hair and he wasn’t sure which one of them deepened it, only that they were both breathing heavy by the time they stopped.

“Maes,” he started, ready to apologize, but Maes just stared back at them both, calm – he was _smiling_ – and Roy didn’t know what to say.

They slept on the floor that night, heads pillowed on couch cushions they’d dragged down and tucked under throw blankets that weren’t big enough for one adult, much less three.

They didn’t talk about the kiss.

Maes was still wearing the skirt come morning.

Two weeks later, Gracia met them at the train station to say goodbye. She pressed a kiss to Maes’ mouth and hugged him tight on the platform, but before Roy could step onto the train, she caught him by the hand and pulled him in, too.

She hugged him, lips pressed to his cheek, and murmured, “Dare you to stay alive.”

He gave her as much a smile as he could muster and nodded.

**_3._ **

Neither of them had been prepared for war. 

Objectively, they’d known what they’d have to do. They’d seen the casualty numbers in the papers and listened to the broadcasts. They’d listened to instructors and commanding officers talking about doing their part to protect Amestris against the Ishvalans.

They hadn’t been prepared for war and deaths that included women and children.

Roy hadn’t been prepared to snap his fingers and burn buildings full of people.

He hadn’t been prepared to listen to them scream.

He hadn’t been prepared for the smell.

He threw up the first time. Cried the five times after that.

By the sixth, he stopped sleeping.

Two days after Gregory was transferred to their battalion, he died.

Bullets flying. Fingers snapping. Bodies dropping. They’d walked into an ambush and lost control of the situation too fast. The other alchemist in their troop was already dead, bloody body laid out and staining the sand red. Roy snapped every time he saw dark skin and switched to his gun when the ignition gloves wore his fingerpads bloody.

Snapped despite the pain when he ran out of bullets and Ishvalan reinforcements started coming in.

Another body went up in flames and he spun, mouth open to tell Maes to be careful, when Gregory got hit.

A bullet blew out the back of his head, blond hair stained red with blood and brain matter as his body fell.

Maes, covered in the spray, stared in horror at dull brown eyes and sunburned skin.

Roy barely managed to snap in time to burn the Ishvalan who was raising his gun at Maes.

“I can’t tell Gracia about this,” Maes told him when Roy found him later, relieved to see the blood washed away. His hand shook around the pen in his grip, the page underneath still blank. “I never know what to tell her. I _can’t_ …” His breath hitched and he turned scared eyes to Roy.

Gregory hadn’t had time to look scared.

He told himself again that he couldn’t have done anything. They’d been covering different ends of the attack. There was no way he could have seen the gun pointed at the other man.

It didn’t change the fact that Gregory would be going home in a bodybag to a mother who’d already lost her husband to the same war.

Roy sank down to the ground next to him as Maes abandoned the letter and they listened to the sound of people moving outside. No one came in. The only person that would was Riza, but she was with another troop on a mission and wasn’t expected back for a couple days. They were alone and, for now, Roy wouldn’t have to look at her with guilt churning his stomach and the knowledge that she shouldn’t _be_ here – that she was there because of _him_.

That, if she died, it would be his fault.

“Truth or dare?” Maes whispered into the quiet a while later.

Roy let out a chuckle that sounded half-hysterical. “ _Now_ ?” he asked, incredulous. “ _Here_?” In the middle of a war? When the first person they played it with would have his name down on the casualty list tomorrow?

“Please?” Maes begged as his breath shook and Roy didn’t have the strength to tell him no. 

“Dare,” he sighed, because it was what he always chose. Maes looked relieved that he had – that he’d stayed consistent and familiar – and he wondered what Maes would have done if he’d picked truth.

“Hold me,” Maes said after a moment. “Tell me we’re going to make it out of here.”

It pulled something painful in Roy to hear him say it. The plea. The way his voice trembled, begging for reassurance of something Roy couldn’t promise him, because he didn’t _know_. He didn’t know if they’d make it home or if Maes would get to see Gracia again. He didn’t know if he’d get to hug his aunt and lose himself in the chatter at the bar while his sisters teased him. They could die tomorrow. They could die the moment they walk outside this goddamn tent.

But he wrapped his arm up around Maes’ shoulders and drew him into his chest, anyway. Let Maes cling to him, arms hooked around his waist too tightly as his body shook. Pressed his cheek against the top of his friend’s hair. “We’ll make it out of here,” he told him and hoped he wasn’t lying.

Wondered if it mattered at all, because Maes hadn’t dared him to tell the truth.

**_4._ **

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t considered Maes coming by the apartment. It may have been lack of sleep or the apathy he’d developed to anything that wasn’t written in a book or drawn across his floor.

In the end, though, the reasoning didn’t matter, because Maes still showed up with a tired smile that gave way to horror.

“I’m experimenting,” he said dully.

Maes punched him for it and pushed him against the wall, hands fisted in Roy’s shirt to hold him there. He wondered if Maes realized he wasn’t fighting – that he didn’t have any fight _left_. Every bit of strength he’d had, he’d left behind in Ishval, burned into buildings and corpses. Burned the strength away until he didn’t have enough in him to pull the trigger when he had the barrel of his gun in his mouth.

“That’s not _experimenting_ , Roy,” Maes growled, face leaned in so close that Roy could feel him spit. “It’s _suicide_.”

“Only if I do it wrong.”

Maes shoved him up against the wall again – towards him and, then, back – so hard, his head cracked against plaster. “You selfish son of a bitch, you don’t get to do that,” he spit at him.

“I can fix-”

“You can’t _fix_ anything, Roy! They’re dead. We _both_ killed people and they’re not coming back,” Maes told him, guilt laced through his tone. Idly, Roy wondered if Maes had been sleeping any better than he was. “Killing yourself isn’t going to change it. There’s a reason it’s taboo. It doesn’t _work_.”

He wasn’t sure the logic of that was right. Maes’ understanding of alchemy was mediocre at best, because he’d always been more interested in knives than science. He wasn’t sure how Maes recognized the circles he’d sketched for what they were, wondered if he’d talked about it during one of those moments in Ishval where the world felt too far away to be real. He didn’t remember the bulk of those conversations, but Maes and Riza had always insisted they’d happened.

Maes kissed him before he could try to formulate a response and it tasted like desperation. It was over before he could think to kiss back and Maes pressed their foreheads together as his breath shuddered. “You can’t die on me.”

“You’re engaged,” he said instead of promising he wouldn’t.

“You think she doesn’t _know_?” Maes asked with a watery laugh. “Gracia’s smarter than that. Why do you think she got you to kiss her?”

_Alcohol, mostly_ , he wanted to say.

“I wrote you nearly as many letters as I wrote Maes.” Gracia’s voice said from the doorway and they both looked over, startled. Maes’ hands went slack in their grip on his shirt, but he didn’t step away as his fiancée gave him a soft smile. “You were taking too long. I got worried.”

Maes stepped backk from him when Gracia was close enough to take his place. She didn’t slam him like Maes had, all anger and fear, but she laid a hand on his cheek and sighed. “Come sit with me.”

Too tired to argue, he did. The couch was too covered in papers for the both of them, but he let her sit in the little space there was and sat himself on the floor instead, eyes closed as she carded her fingers through his hair. He listened to Maes move around – the rustle of papers and the sound of the sink turning on – and couldn’t bring himself to look as his friend cleaned up the mess he’d made. All his plans.

“I dared you to stay alive, remember?” Gracia asked him at one point, voice impossibly soft. She’d abandoned the couch by then to share the floor with him, his head pillowed in her lap. “That doesn’t end just because the war did.”

He wondered when it would. Some days, he wasn’t sure if he’d even come home from Ishval at all – if it counted as coming home when he felt like he’d left half of himself in blood-soaked sand and bombed out buildings.

He didn’t ask.

He didn’t want to see what it would do to her face if he did.

“When did he tell you?” he asked eventually when he got sick of listening to the scrub of a brush against his floor. Cleaning up the outlines, he thought. Maes was erasing the evidence, but they were still in his head.

“He didn’t have to,” she told him with a little shake of her head. She’d cut her hair shorter than it had been when they’d come home. He wasn’t even sure how long ago that was anymore. “I know what Maes looks like when he loves someone and he’s looked at you like that since I met him.” There wasn’t any accusation in her tone, no anger that they’d lied to her. She’d known they were friends, but they’d – or at least _he’d_ – stayed tight-lipped about the time they were more. Instead, she smiled down at him, a gentle little thing that spoke of so much understanding that it made his chest tight, and she smoothed his hair off his forehead. “I asked him about it after I figured it out. All he did was confirm it. I never asked about the rest.”

“She’s too good for either of us,” Maes spoke up from across the room. Roy didn’t look at him – couldn’t stand to look at the work he was scrubbing away – but he could hear the smile in his voice. The love.

_Us_.

He stared at Gracia, startled, and pushed himself out of her lap. She let him go without protest, hands sitting calmly in her lap, as things began to slot into place. The kiss. Her goodbye at the train station. The letters she’d sent him. The way she’d chased after him when they came home and he’d tried to walk away.

And always – _always_ – Maes watching them with that same calm smile. Looking on as he read her letters. Hugging them both on the platform as they stood in everyone’s way, one big mess of limbs, as he sighed _we’re home_ into Roy’s ear.

He let out a breath as the dots connected and she smiled at him, unashamed and unapologetic. “Truth or dare?” she asked.

It had always been a game he and Maes initiated in their desperate moments to cling to something that felt more innocent than the reality of the world around them, but Gracia… He’d thought he’d feel possessive of it – stupid as it was – but he didn’t. It was _Gracia_.

He swallowed around a suddenly dry throat. “Dare.”

“Live,” Maes said, voice a little rough as he came up on Roy’s side and put a hand on the back of his neck. It was a solid weight – grounding – even if he could feel the dampness on his hand. “We didn’t come all this way just to bury you now that we’re home.”

Gracia reached for his hand and pulled it into her lap. “That’s your dare, Roy,” she told him, voice impossibly gentle. “Live.”

Breath shuddering, he nodded.

**_5._ **

He shouldn’t be here.

Everyone was still on high alert after the attack and he’d barely even managed to convince Riza he’d be okay on his own, but… God, he’d needed to see him. Needed to see Maes and know he was alive, because he’d _seen_ the phonebooth and the blood.

Seen the bloody jacket a passerby had used to try and stem the bleeding while they called for help.

He needed to get the woman’s name so he could thank her.

Elicia had drawn a picture for the _nice lady who helped Daddy when he got hurt_.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw a bloody phone and pools spread out across the ground. Saw bloody smears on the wall in Central Command. He’d been attacked in a place that was supposed to be the most secure base in the _country_. Gracia couldn’t even come by for lunch without getting ID'd three times and Maes getting called twice for verification.

And someone had managed to attack him in the goddamn archive room.

He curled his fingers into fists, staring down at Maes. Too pale. Too still. It wasn’t _right_. When Maes slept, it was with his arms spread out and searching for the closest human to cuddle up to. It was with that war-learned hair trigger that would wake him up in a second if he heard something.

Gracia had said she never had to worry about not hearing Elicia when she was a baby, because Maes _always_ heard.

Now, he lay in the bed with its too-white sheets and too-thin blankets with his arms laid down along his sides, right shoulder wrapped thick in bandages and his chest…

God, his chest.

He hadn’t been there, hadn’t gotten to Central fast enough before they’d had to rush Maes into surgery and crack open his chest. Cut him open like a goddamn cadaver at autopsy and…

He choked back bile.

Comatose. The doctors said it was the blood loss. He’d very nearly bled to death – _had_ died on the table – and his brain had been starved for oxygen and they just weren’t sure when he’d wake up. If.

The last time they’d spoken, he’d hung up on Maes for teasing him about settling down.

He never thought he’d regret it.

“Roy?”

He looked over at Gracia curled up the couch in the corner, but blinking at him in the soft light from over Maes’ bed. She swung her legs over the side, one hand rubbing at the back of her neck like it was sore. “Any change?” he asked as his eyes swung back towards Maes.

Gracia sighed. “Same as yesterday,” she told him. “Riza let you go out alone?”

“She’s got Havoc tailing me. I lost him a block after we left Central Command.”

It made her giggle, at least, even if Havoc was probably out there somewhere, stress smoking his whole pack and wondering where exactly Riza was going to shoot him. “Training?” she teased.

“How else is he going to learn?” He reached out, backs of his fingers skimming over Maes’ cheek. He’d spiked a fever after surgery that had left Gracia a nervous wreck as his sisters took turns babysitting Elicia. The fever seemed to have broken now, though.

“Are there any leads?”

Roy shook his head. “Not yet. It had to be someone with access to Central Command who attacked him on base, but we haven’t figured out who,” he said. “We don’t even know if the person that attacked him there is the same person who shot him. Everyone’s still on high alert in case it was an inside job.”

But Gracia knew him just as well as Maes and Riza did. “You think it was.” It wasn’t a question.

“Someone got the attacker _in_ ,” he told her, “and it was either with their own ID or under someone else’s okay. The guards are going to stay posted outside the door, anyway, just in case.”

“You should be careful too,” she chided him softly. “Scar is still out there.”

He grimaced at the reminder. “I am.”

“You slipped your guard.”

“I slipped _Havoc_.”

She shook her head like it wasn’t an argument she had the strength to make. “Are you sleeping?”

“Enough.” No.

“Roy-”

“I’ll sleep when we figure out who attacked him,” he assured her. “I’ve gotten by on less before.”

“In a _warzone_.”

“I’m fine, Gracia.”

“No, you’re not,” she whispered. “None of us are.” Her face crumpled into something sad and so scared that he couldn’t move. He wanted to reach out for her, but he didn’t know his place. He never knew his place. A few years ago, he’d thought… But he’d been in so many pieces after Ishval and he’d had to pick himself back up on his own. He hadn’t let himself lean on them and, slowly, other than a handful of moments over the years, they’d all gone back to the way they’d been before the night they dared him to live.

Now, he never knew what was skirting the line between supportive and stolen moments when emotions overcame sense.

“Gracia…”

She shook her head, eyes pressed closed, but he could see the way her shoulders shook. “Truth or dare?” she whispered finally, voice full of pain.

It felt like a punch to the gut, because even if they’d let Gracia in on their stupid tradition, it still made him think of Gregory grinning across a circle and the first press of Maes’ lips to his.

“Dare,” he whispered, like any louder would shatter them both.

“Stay with me?” He didn’t think she meant to make it a question, but the fear made her voice pitch upwards at the end. Fear for Maes. Fear for him. Fear for Elicia. She reached out for him. “Please?”

He took her hand and let her pull him onto the couch with her, their joined hands clutched to her chest as she curled into his side. He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Her breath shuddered.

**_+1_ **

“Stay?” Gracia whispered one night when he drove her home and Roy, tired as he was, couldn’t bring himself to say no. He sat on her and Maes’ bed with his hands on his knees and his head bowed as she carried Elicia to bed. Tried to not think about the scattered moments they’d been in here together – he, Gracia, and Maes. Tried to not think about hands and kisses and limbs sliding together until he wasn’t sure whose were whose.

“He’ll be okay,” Gracia whispered when she joined him, but he didn’t think she was talking to him. She twisted the ring on her finger. “He’ll wake up.”

Roy didn’t argue it, didn’t have it in him to remind her that he might _not_ , because he couldn’t hurt her like that. War had made him a pessimist and, sometimes, hope hurt too much. He didn’t reply, but he stayed. He took the pajamas she handed him with the pants that were too long and the t-shirt that was too wide in the shoulders and held her as she cried.

If she heard the way his breath shook, she didn’t mention it.

He started staying over more than he didn’t, curled around his best friend’s wife as they slept and wearing another man’s pajamas that comforted him just as much as it made him want to _die_.

“I love you,” Gracia whispered into his chest one night, face buried in her husband’s shirt.

They almost kissed that night and probably would have if Maes wasn’t where he was. If he’d _been_ with them. If they’d all been together.

They didn’t kiss, but they pressed their foreheads together and didn’t talk about how Roy didn’t say it back.

He’d never said it back. He never had when it was all of them and he couldn’t when it was only two.

Burns still healing on his side, Elicia wrapped her little hands around his and grinned. “Time to come home, Uncle Roy,” she said brightly as Gracia smiled at them both from the doorway of the hospital room, car key dangling from her finger.

He looked at Gracia, wide-eyed and ready to protest, but she shook her head at him and he went silent.

“Time to come home,” she told him.

He stopped going to his apartment for anything more than extra clothes.

Eventually, he stopped going back for even those.

“When’s Daddy coming home?” Elicia asked him one night as he put her to bed.

The hand that had been reaching for the lightswitch stilled. It shouldn’t be him answering her questions, because he was starting to think the answer was _never_ , but he couldn’t say that. He should answer with Gracia’s usual _soon_ , but he couldn’t even bring himself to say the lie her mother told.

“As soon as he can,” was what he settled on and prayed to a god he’d stopped believing in while he sweat in the Ishvalan heat.

Prayed he hadn’t lied.

He went blind and couldn’t remember what Gracia had been wearing when he left that morning or which cheek Elicia had had yogurt smeared across.

Tried to remember what Maes looked like when he smiled and forgot how to breathe when he couldn’t remember.

Marcoh brought back his sight and the girls were the first thing he saw; Gracia sitting on the bed with Elicia in her lap.

“Can you see me, Uncle Roy?” Elicia asked.

She was more blur than person and he felt a spike of anxiety at it. Fear that his sight was going to blink right back out of existence.

“There wasn’t much power left,” Marcoh told them, voice heavy with exhaustion and regret. “I couldn’t restore all of it.”

Gracia helped him pick out a set of wire frames while Elicia tried on dummy pairs for fun.

Riza ordered four extra pairs and gave him a deadpan look when he squawked in offense.

Then, she ordered a fifth.

Maes woke up a month after the Promised Day, blinking awake in his hospital room while Gracia and Elicia napped on the couch and Roy sat beside him with the paperwork Riza told him had to be done by five or he was risking various body parts that couldn’t be replaced with automail.

“What’s on your face?” came the hoarse question and Roy startled so bad that the file fell out of his hands.

Dark eyes lifted up to the man on the bed and a weight lifted off his shoulders. Awake, he told himself. He was _awake_ and it wasn’t those short moments of consciousness where he slipped back under almost as soon as he’d opened his eyes. Maes was actually looking at him and _talking_ . He was _aware_ and it was like Roy could _breathe_ again. 

He gave a little chuckle as he reached out to stroke Maes’ cheek. “You’ve missed a lot.”

They brought him home three weeks later with Maes supported between a cane and Roy as they made a slow path up the stairs to his and Gracia’s apartment. They didn’t talk about the harder parts – about the months Maes would lose to physical therapy or the damage the bullet had done that had probably ended his military career – but they walked in to a _welcome home_ sign Elicia had drawn and a cake Gracia had baked.

Everybody cried and nobody tried to hide it, but while Maes hugged Gracia on the couch, Roy slipped into the bedroom to pack up his stuff. They didn’t notice until he’d come back down the hall with a suitcase in his hand and Gracia’s eyes went wide.

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” he said and tried to pretend he didn’t see the hurt that flashed across her face. He didn’t try to hide it, didn’t try to lie and tell Maes that he hadn’t been sleeping here for months. It wasn’t worth it and it didn’t matter, because this wasn’t his place. It had never truly been his place, no matter how much he’d wished it could be sometimes.

“Truth or dare?” Maes asked suddenly as Gracia opened her mouth to protest.

Roy looked at him, surprised, and he opened his mouth to say _dare_ like usual. “Truth,” he said instead and wasn’t even sure why he did.

To his credit, Maes didn’t even blink. “Do you love us?”

And maybe that was why he’d always avoided picking truth, because some part of him had known what Maes had always wanted to ask. The question he’d been scared to answer, because giving an answer and putting the facts out there made it _real_. Real things could hurt.

He looked at Maes and at Gracia, though, and he knew. It was the same thing he’d known for years since he and Maes kissed in the privacy of an Academy dorm room and since he’d laid on a messy floor with his head in Gracia’s lap.

“Yes,” he breathed and cracked himself wide open for them, because he loved them more than he could understand and had never been able to make himself _say_ . Had never had the _strength_ to say, even when Gracia said it with words and Maes’ eyes said it every time he looked at Roy.

“Then, don’t go,” Gracia told him as she got up from the couch and made her way to him so she could lace thin fingers with his. “We want you here.”

“You heard the lady,” Maes said and, suddenly, it was like they were seven years in the past and sitting on the floor of Gracia’s apartment. Roy forgot how to breathe – thought he was _dying_ when Gracia pressed her lips to his and guided him back to where Maes sat on the couch.

Maes pulled him down when he was close enough and kissed him too.

Someone with his past and so much blood on his hands shouldn’t _get_ something like this, he thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice the argument, because he’d almost lost any chance of this. If Maes had never woken up – if he’d _died_ – he’d have never let himself near Gracia again, because something would be _missing_.

But they were all here and they were alive and maybe – just maybe – he could finally let himself reach for what he wanted.

“Is Uncle Roy staying?” Elicia asked as she tugged on her mother’s skirt.

Gracia smiled and lifted her up onto her hip. “You’ll have to ask him,” she said as all eyes turned to him and he stared at them all. The familiar, calm smile on Maes’ lips. The nervous, hopeful way Gracia chewed on her bottom lip. The wide-eyed look of wonder on Elicia’s face.

“Yeah,” he breathed out and let himself feel settled for the first time since they told him he’d be going off to war. “Yeah, I’m staying.”

The End


End file.
